2013

Although the entry was a little down on previous years, some 30 competitors enjoyed an excellent competition using the new venue at Edgecott, not far from the traditional Marsh Gibbon site. The conditions were challenging although there was often excellent lift around but the strong (15 to 20mph plus) wind did limit how far anyone could follow lift downwind. However, essentially, it stayed dry and all competitors really enjoyed the event.

We had six German competitors, our faithful four regular attendees from the Netherlands, one Norwegian and the remainder made up by the UK pilots. As this international event is one of the three events which comprise the UK team selection contests for the 2014 F3J World Championships it might have been expected to have had a slightly larger UK entry but the date selected in August did not suit some – it is of course difficult to fix the dates for all the F3J Eurotour events in a way which matches everyone’s diary. No radically new models were on display but the field offered the normal crop of Maxas, Xplorers, Shadows, Tragis, Pike Perfects and Tobias Lammlein was flying one of the Pike Perfections which were being used. The choice between Vee and Cruciform tails was fairly even, the cruciform layout being (just) in the majority.

As there were 30 pilots, that allowed a neat division into six teams and five groups per round. This helped significantly in allowing five rounds to be flown on the Saturday even although there were two re-fly slots and a 20 minute or so hold for a light shower. We were lucky in that although the wind never abated, a couple of serious looking spells of rain tracked down on both sides of the field without affecting the contest. The re-flys were triggered by mid -air collisions on launch, unfortunate as, at these launch speeds, significant damage is in general done to expensive models and this factor may yet prove the “Achilles Heel” for F3J as similar collisions are less likely with F5J models. John Stanswood was one of the unfortunate pilots to suffer a launch mid-air but he did not realise, at the time, his model was damaged and he continued to fly albeit with the increasing understanding that the model was not responding quite as it should. Colin Boorman was also affected by a launch mid-air – the launches at the time were directly into the sun, but he landed immediately and found that he still had a relatively unscathed model.

At the end of day one the top pilots were Fred Thijssen, Colin Paddon, Mattias Schumacher, Peter Allen, Tobias Lammlein and Michael Clauss with Wim Niewenhuizen from the Netherlands bring up the seventh place. Day two featured very similar weather with a forecast for rain later in the day so a brisk start was made to complete three more preliminary rounds and so allow (after seven rounds) for a dropped score. This actually did not make a huge difference to the leader-board and the top six pilots going into the fly-off were Tobias Lammlein, Fred Thijssen, Peter Allen, Daniel Probsfeld, Colin Paddon and Michael Clauss.

Three fly-off rounds were flown and these were amongst the most interesting fly-off rounds which spectators have witnessed, the air was becoming progressively more challenging and the pilots were taking advantage of the multiple re-launches now allowed so that it was very hard to keep track of relative standings. Tobias won the first fly-off round convincingly and Fred Tyijssen the second. In the second round Tobias made a rare error in re-launching to head initially for Fred’s model but he then moved downwind and dropped out whereas Fred stayed upwind in lift. Meantime Colin Paddon had clocked a couple of reasonable scores in these two fly-off rounds and, come the third (where lift was very hard to find indeed), Colin with the aid of a re-launch, managed the best time so coming once again the winner of BARCS Interglide. As the results show, Colin was followed by Tobias, Peter, Fred, Daniel and Michael – this is the fifth time that Colin has won Interglide – a quite outstanding achievement!

Off the field we broke new ground with the evening BBQ. For a few years past Jim Wright of Invinghoe Soarers and his wife have produced an excellent on-field BBQ however this was becoming an onerous task so Gary Binnie had arranged that we could all join the evening BBQ being hosted by the full size gliding club at Bicester. With the much greater numbers involved (and an on-site bar) the facilities were excellent and a wide choice of food was provided however in the crowd one had to search for the model flyers but, once found, the arrangements worked well. Many people, including the German contingent, also took advantage of the gliding centre to camp there – temptation of course was to stay at the bar longer than most but with three Germans out of the six in the fly-off, it did not affect their flying performance on the following day!